The fedora.eskimo.com shell server is restored.

The scientific7.eskimo.com shell server will be going down for maintenance shortly.  Expected downtime is approximately 45 minutes.

The maintenance work on ubuntu.eskimo.com is completed.

The shell server fedora.eskimo.com will be going down for maintenance in about half an hour.

The shell server ubuntu.eskimo.com is presently down for maintenance work.  It is being imaged so that current backups reflect recent security improvements and updates.  Expected downtime is about 45 minutes.

The Fedora upgrade has been a success.

That said, the one thing I HATE about Fedora 21 is the Software Installer, actually I hated the Software Installer in Fedora 20, but then I had options, Packages, Apper, etc, but they’ve broken back-end support for categories so these alternatives no longer work.

Now, if you don’t know the name of a package (and then you can use yum), you’re stuck with browsing through an ultra-slow interface, to install extremely slowly (if it doesn’t blow up altogether) software the Fedora folks have decided are worthy of being included.

It is slow, arbitrary, hard to find things, and when you do find them it takes forever and a day and you can only install from one subcategory at a time, it won’t show you any others until installations finish in the first.

I wish they’d take a clue from OpenSuse, their installer, Yast, resolves dependencies up front so you know about any conflicts and can select a resolution BEFORE you start the install process.  It lays things out in an logical organized fashion, it doesn’t require someone to create a graphic for each potentially installable program before it can be included.

So to the Fedora folks, if you want to create a highly graphical kludgey installer, great, but leave the back-end support in place for more functional installers that work.

Fedora is currently down for upgrade from Fedora 20 to Fedora 21.  Since the machine has been getting very little use and nobody was on it, I didn’t think it would hurt to do it during normal hours.

I’m attempting a network update, but if that fails I will just re-install from scratch.  This won’t affect users home directories or mail, those are on a separate file server.

Shellx is under a botnet based brute force password guessing attack.  The attackers seem to be under the mistaken belief that it is a D-link router as they are primarily trying passwords for a non-existent user D-link.

To limit the resources consumed, I’ve set the fail2ban time to an hour instead of the usual ten minutes so if you get your password wrong three times you will either need to wait an hour or use a different shell server.

Need to reboot the main file server, and physical machines that host various virtual machines.  This will be done just after midnight and will take approximately 25 minutes each, starting with the main file server.

Then I have to take various machines down for imaging, this will take approximately 25 minutes per machine as well, although that varies somewhat with each machine, shellx is the longest, some of the others are quicker.

This work is necessary to install the most recent software and make sure we have current backups in the event anything breaks.

I hope everyone had a pleasant Thanksgivings.  I apologize for not getting something out prior.  I got to spend the afternoon / evening with my oldest son Carl, second oldest son Raymond, and my wife Tina over at Carl’s house where we cooked up a turkey.

Tonight I will need to be taking servers down for maintenance, reboots to load new kernels, some down time to image machines with significant updates.  Anything involving machines with customers on them such as occupied shell servers or servers which aren’t duplicated, will be done after midnight early Saturday morning, other machines which don’t have customers currently logged in or which are duplicated and thus can be taken down without impacting service, will be done earlier in the evening.

As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve been working on the website.  If you have any input with respect to issues or things you’d like to see on it, please let me know.

E-mail support@eskimo.com

I will be a bit late into the office today as I have to make a trip to the co-location facility to resurrect a broken Radius server.  Radius infrastructure is duplicated so this should not affect authentication except to delay it slightly if it is the first server tried.